Inspirational stories of women, men and organisations from across Asia

Driving excellence at work place

Ashwani Nandini — Vice President, GlobalLogic

With over two decades of experience in the field of Product Engineering Services, Ashwani Nandini is the Vice President — Delivery at GlobalLogic, a ‘leader in experience design and digital product development space (www.globallogic.com). With expertise in people management, establishing and nurturing competencies and capabilities and ensuring delivery excellence, Nandini started at GlobalLogic with three projects and about 50 people. Today, after eight years in the organisation, she is managing the Noida engineering centre that has 1200 plus employees.

Nandini pursued her B.Sc. in Mathematics and passed out a topper after which she did her MCA from Delhi University. She is also a frequent speaker at the technology conferences hosted by thought leadership groups such as NASSCOM, Times Group, and Silicon India.

Her interests are reading about latest trends in tech and business, mentoring and grooming her teams, promoting innovation in her delivery center and watching movies.

High point in career

“My high point would be when the GlobalLogic executive leadership found me worthy enough to be the delivery head of Noida engineering center in 2012. Prior to that, the delivery organization was aligned with the business units, resulting in delivery organization operating in silos. This move was needed as the delivery organization needed to collaborate better as the organization was scaling. It was a challenge to begin with to bring the various disparate units together and it took a lot of work to unite everyone together. Nevertheless, it has been exciting and definitely a high point in my career.”

Most challenging assignment so far

“The high point in my career would also be my most challenging assignment till date, heading the GlobalLogic delivery center and there were two reasons for the same – The delivery center was aligned to the business units and the task was to bring together various disparate units, which required a lot of patience and hard work, therefore was challenging. I also worked very hard to understand the capabilities of the individual delivery units separately, understood all the partner engagements and came up with the center’s capabilities and competencies. Noida delivery center’s capabilities and competencies were harnessed, nurtured over a period of time, and it started making a huge impact and being known for those competencies and capabilities by everyone at GlobalLogic globally, that was a huge sense of achievement for me. Today, right from mobility to big data to cloud to IoT to design. We are experts and have case studies for pretty much every industry and every domain.”

Greatest inspiration

“I am hugely inspired by Chanda Kochhar, who in spite of not having a famous surname has worked hard to be where she wanted to be. Everything right from her self-belief, her perseverance and her leadership qualities inspire me a lot. She is a huge inspiration not only for what she has achieved in her professional life but also for having a fulfilling family life and showing the women of the world that we can have it all. I also love her sense of dressing in beautiful sarees as she presents a picture of Indianness.”

Most important milestone in life

“I set short term targets for myself- both in personal as well as professional life and I feel very happy when I achieve them. I set targets to say read a particular book, read about a particular trend, work on creating a particular strategy — feel happy when I achieve what I was set out to.

The bigger milestone is to grow continuously and evolve as a person and a professional with every passing quarter and year. I am happy when I look over the last three years that I managed to put the GlobalLogic Noida center in the right track and the stage is set beautifully and Noida engineering delivery center is poised for big growth in the coming years — the vision of Noida delivery center in the future makes me very happy and makes me set bigger milestones for myself.”

Women are the better halves. What does it mean?

“I truly believe that challenges in the professional life are similar for men and women although both might handle those challenges in different ways. Numerous studies have shown that women excel at collaborating, building relationships, nurturing talent which not only helps in their professional life but also helps them to manage their personal lives.

Expectation of the society towards women even in this time and date given the region we are in, is high as it is believed that women can manage both professional and personal life well at the same time. And it is correct, women can prioritize and manage their time well. We, women very well know how to prioritize our lives based on the phase of life we are in and do this effortlessly. All of these qualities in women I believe make them the better halves.”